Today we face a climate of ever increasing misdirection by popular media. This site, along with others, aims to reveal the reality of America and the loss of fact inherent to the over riding theme of our current political and social confusion: Purposeful deception.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Trevon Martin Slaying Should Be Call To Action to Reawaken Civil Rights Movement

The tragic killing of Trevon
Martin in Sanford, Fla., has provoked national outrage and is
also the subject of a Justice Department probe. This is a far different
response from the virulent racist America
of a century ago, when white America
and Washington
were indifferent to such slayings. The outrage sweeping the country today
over the young man’s slaying suggests something very important has changed for
the better. And it should be a call to action.

Back in the 1920s, when the
Ku Klux Klan was at the pinnacle of its sadistic influence, as many as 1,000
lynchings of black men took place in a typical year and any national outcries
against them were muted. Klansmen could murder in cold blood and go to work the
next morning as if nothing had happened. White Americans, generally, did not
get upset over lynchings. Ku Klux Klan members often held posts of influence in
their communities, particularly in the South. The murdered blacks had few, if
any, allies in the white communities. Presidents such as Woodrow Wilson were
themselves racist.

Not far from where Trevon
Martin was shot down, on Christmas Eve, 1951, the NAACP’s Rev. Harry T. Moore
and his wife were murdered by KKK dynamiters with a bomb planted under their
bedroom. I remember walking in a small, largely African-American protest march
in Rev. Moore’s memory the following New Year’s Day through the streets of
downtown Miami.
Perhaps there were some sympathetic white onlookers but I do not recall
any.

Only four years later,
though, the murder of 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till in Money, Miss., for allegedly whistling at a white woman, created
huge street demonstrations on Chicago’s
South Side. Listening to the orators addressing the crowds, I had the welcome
feeling the Black community, at the least, was not going to stand for it any
more. Too many Black veterans were asking, “What did we fight for to be treated
this way?” The outrage was fierce as Till’s killers were acquitted of his
torture and murder. Till’s Mother insisted on an open casket funeral so the
public could witness how the killers had brutalized her son. Protected by laws
against double jeopardy, after their acquittal, the killers casually admitted
their guilt and walked free.

It has been said that Till’s
murder was the spark that ignited the civil rights movement. In that struggle,
still unfinished, the introduction of the non-violent response by Rev. Martin
Luther King created vast sympathy for oppressed Black citizens. The Montgomery bus boycott
impressed the nation with their courage and determination and their struggle
for equal rights and opportunities. By 1963, the climate had so changed that
King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial generated an
overwhelming positive national response.

Following this remarkable
address, the civil rights cause accelerated rapidly. The continued sacrifices
of both Blacks and whites alike had put a large segment of America’s white
population on the side of social justice. In June, 1966, when James Meredith was
shot down in Mississippi,
the shooter was apprehended within minutes by the local sheriff and put on
trial and convicted---an outcome that would have been unthinkable a decade
earlier.

The day after the shooting,
in my capacity as Meredith’s press coordinator, I told an NBC “Today Show”
audience that his several companions planned to finish his March Against Fear,
and invited people of good will to join us. Thousands from all races responded
over the next few weeks so that the renewed march became, literally, a turning
point and victory celebration over Jim Crow in Mississippi. Voting rolls were opened to
Blacks and we received the support of many white Mississippi residents who had been waiting
for an opportunity to step forward and speak up for racial equality but had
been afraid to do so.

In spite of all the civil
rights movement has achieved, a descriptive term that can still be applied to
Black communities today, unfortunately, remains “plight.” The statistics on
Black-white disparities in income, housing, justice, and education remain
profound.

Administration after
administration, including the present one, has failed to make amends for what
is now four centuries of historic racism. President Obama has shown more
interest in pursuing the foreign wars of his predecessor than in spending the
trillions of dollars wasted on those wars to promote the general welfare of
Americans.

This includes the need to
level the playing field for African-Americans, by supporting decent housing,
crime reduction and penal reform, full employment, job training, quality
education, leveling the playing field for unions, and more job opportunities
created by employers, state governments and Washington.

The battle is ongoing. One
affirmative step would be to teach basic non-violence to every child in every
school in America.
Another would be entrepreneurial teaching (self-reliance and business acumen)
starting in grade school. Trevon Martin’s death should serve to remind us of
the long road that has already been traveled just as it informs us of how far
we as a nation have to go. It should be a call to action for social justice for
the African-American community.

(Sherwood Ross formerly worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and as
News Director of a large civil rights organization. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com)

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